> developers agree on its usefulness. But the experience of giving this

> code away for the benefit of others is less than ideal. I'm happy to

> persevere, push it to the right place, do the right thing. But will

> the next aspiring developer who wants to share a small, useful hack

> bother themselves with the process?

Maybe as an Ubuntu core-dev you want to upload a useful-hacks package

and accept all contributions in this vein in to that?

Thanks,

James

Like many of you, I have some useful scripts in my $HOME/bin directory, and aliases in my $HOME/.bashrc.

I have contributed some of these to existing open source projects, while others have turned into stand-alone free software packages/projects themselves. In other cases, I have tried, with great heartache, to contribute useful utilities to open source projects. Sometimes these work out eventually, but it can take many months or years of persistence to win the approval of some maintainers. These are most certainly battles worth fighting, but in the meantime, there are many Ubuntu users and developers who could benefit from these tools.

While others debate where some tool should go, we put it in the bikeshed.

The package description goes into a little more detail:

Description: random useful tools that do not yet have a permanent homeBikeshed is a collection of random but useful tools and utilities that either don't quite fit anywhere else, or have not yet been accepted by a more appropriate project. Think of this package as an "orphanage", where tools live until they are adopted by loving, accepting parents.

The name of the project reflects the tremendous insight provided by Poul-Henning Kamp on a FreeBSD mailing list in 1999. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend you do. It's 11 years old and directed toward FreeBSD development, but it applies to ubuntu-devel@ and debian-devel@ and most other software development mailing lists just as well today.

The general concept is known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality, from 1957, when C. Northcote Parkinson described the unfortunate effects of trivial matters carrying disproportionate weight (and actually first used the bike shed example).

I'm going to describe each utility in bikeshed in a series of posts here in my blog. Hopefully you will find some of them very useful!

Honestly, it doesn't matter to me at all if anyone else contributes to Bikeshed. More than anything, I just want to have a place to put useful utilities, while others debate (bikeshed) about the best home for such tools. When there's a consensus to its appropriate destination, then I'll retire it from the Bikeshed, and plant it in a permanent home.

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About the Author

Previously, Dustin was the VP of Product at Canonical, having led the amazing team that delivers Ubuntu, from the Cloud to IoT commercial offerings.

Formerly the CTO of Gazzang, a venture funded start-up acquired by Cloudera, Dustin designed and implemented a key management system for cloud applications, called zTrustee, and delivered comprehensive security for cloud and big data platforms with eCryptfsand other encryption technologies.